Tool for exploring district and community energy solutions
URBANopt
Client: U.S. Department of Energy and the National Laboratory of the Rockies
Results
Gained funding from the initial proof-of-concept
proposal to continue the project.
>375k Ladybug Tools Dragonfly downloads, which uses URBANopt, from ~100,000 unique accounts since Sep 2020.
>140k URBANopt project folders based on download stats.
Active Ladybug Tools User Community:
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Over 3,000 monthly active forum users.
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Roughly 6,000 page views per day.
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Roughly 25 newly posted topics per day
Used by companies like Skidmore, Owings, & Merrill to successfully pilot Dragonfly/ URBANopt core capabilities on district projects.
My Contributions
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Persona and use case development
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User experience and interface design. Interface development was left to the private sector, but the mockups demonstrated the capabilities of the software development kit.
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Experience design for the documentation website
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Help tell the story with presentations, posters, animations, illustrations, and diagrams.
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Contributed to publication: https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2016/data/index.htm
Goal
The initial goal of this project was proof-of-concept for a tool that would help district planners, architects, and engineers to design and optimize net-zero and high-performance energy districts and district energy systems. The idea was to explore the feasibility and requirements. The tool would be built on the U.S. Department of Energy’s open source building energy modeling platform (OpenStudio and EnergyPlus).
I created wireframes using the requirements we gathered. These were instrumental in gaining feedback on the functionality needed by the tool. The designs were used in presentations, posters, and reports to help gain funding for the tool. They demonstrated what could be done with the URBANopt backend.
Personas, Use Cases, and Wireframes
Learn more about URBANopt at: